Doc Activity 2 Participatory Mode

Participatory documentaries are films where the filmmaker and subject interact with each other. In my documentary I decided to film the BYU Fencing club which meets every Tuesday at 8:30 pm and Saturday at noon. I attended that club for awhile when I was a freshman, but as the years went by, I slowly stopped going. I had heard that at one point BYU had a fencing team. Unfortunately, it disbanded when Title IX was first introduced. Some say that Title IX got rid of it, but there are many rumors that explain why this happened; so I decided to go back for one day and ask the club president some questions in hopes of perhaps finding the truth and being able to determine the future of this club and to see if it has any chance of becoming a SWELL class (which they have been trying to achieve for many years).

Participatory documentaries are a fascinating topic. Some may confuse participatory with performative. The difference is performative is all about the filmmaker’s perspective of truth. Everything that we see is something that the author of the documentary finds important and that the audience should know about the topic too. Participatory is when the filmmaker is part of the film. It is like the film Sherman’s March where the filmmaker stayed active with whoever he was recording. A performative documentarian may also express his views on certain subjects like I did when the club president and I talked about how much we really want to have a fencing class.

Nichols mentions that participatory mode is also a collaboration between filmmaker and subject. This can be found in The Chronicles of Summer where the filmmaker interacts with a Jewish survivor from one of the Nazi concentration camps during WWII. I would say that I fully collaborated with the fencing club. I never gave them a heads up about it; I just showed up and told them I was going to document them and share our thoughts about the hopeful future of the club and our desires that will hopefully happen someday.

There were a lot of things I wanted to include in my documentary originally, but with the short time limit, I had to cut a significant portion off. Everything that I kept was what I found necessary. I did what I could to implement how Sherman’s March was created by talking to my subjects. I also decided to put myself in the documentary itself by showing some footage of me fencing and doing some the warmups.

“Filmmakers make use of the interview to bring different accounts together in a single story” (Nichols). This is exactly how I used the interview with the club president. She mentions some of her passions about fencing as I juxtaposed the footage of everyone while we listened to our interaction with each other. Then near the end I tied it all together when I too shared my hopes and dreams of the future of the club. We may not know exactly why the fencing team disbanded, but what we know is our fight for fencing is still strong.